Yearning for a Broken Heart

“Heal my heart and make it clean,

Open up my eyes to the things unseen,

Show me how to love like You have loved me,

Break my heart for what breaks Yours,

Everything I have for Your Kingdom’s cause,

As I walk from Earth into eternity.”

— Hillsong United (Hosanna)

Like many, worship easily brings me to tears when I consider the awesome theological facts we sing from the bottom of our hearts. The bridge, above, is a fantastic portrayal of an attempt to experience our existence as God experiences it.

The idea is an utter Spirit-filled concern as God would be concerned.

But such fullness of commitment to live as God would have us live does not come easily. We cannot make ourselves think this way. Only when the Lord invades upon our lives, redeeming control over us, and blessing us all the same, do we stand a chance to have hearts transformed into the likeness of the Son.

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The six lines of this bridge show, what I believe, to be a process by which God blesses us in our sincerely seeking him.

Despite the years of theological training anyone can amass, the heart closest to God is that which has desired God richly, uniquely, unswervingly, and beyond all doubt.

The Passage to Loving like God Loves

We cannot pretend to love, for we are found out. Of all things we cannot fake it is love that abounds most in truth. Love and truth coexist, informing each other.

When we desire that God would heal us and make us clean, when he does that, he will also open up our eyes to the things unseen. Then we will know how to love others as God, himself, has loved us. We cannot see unless we are healed. And we cannot be healed unless we make ourselves available to be healed. That’s humility.

We all need healing.

To desire that God would break our hearts for what breaks his is not only a bold prayer, but it is the prayer to be touched; by the very hand of God itself. And this is why we need to be healed first. When we have been healed there is no distraction impeding our approach to the throne room of God. We fear no one and nothing. And when we are healed our emotions belong to God and are a vessel for blessing.

When we can invest in life to the degree of the fullness of our emotions—having been summarily healed of any vast hurts—we become perfectly willing to throw ourselves down before God’s throne. Then, we can give everything we have—and not before time.

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When everything we have and everything in us is for God, our hearts break for injustice and suffering. Yearning for such a broken heart is the pinnacle of Christian living we should strive for; hearts broken and convicted to help those in need.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.